The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.
Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.
Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?
I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.
I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.
Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).
My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.
What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.
Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.
(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).
A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…
…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?
I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.
Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.
I hate Google.
I think the word you are looking for here is “cowards”
I think it is rather that conservatism has nothing to do with being conservative really at the end of the day, that is just the team colors these people wear to identify what team they are on.
Conservatives are conservative so they can hate without guilt and so they can control and possess with violence and be rewarded for it. From this angle the synergy heinous shitheads see in being a Republican and being a pedophile (but also defining your public persona completely around hating pedophiles too) is pretty straightforward in my opinion. Also probably the most pathetic thing on the face of the earth.
The FBI already investigate LEO across the country more than a decade ago and found that white supremacists were actively infiltrating our police force. Nothing has been done about this finding.
White supremacists are “infiltrating” into police forces in the same way I infiltrate into my buddies house… when they specifically invite me over to hang out with them at their house and stand up and come over and hug me with a warm greeting when I show up.
There is NO sense of infiltration here, rather we are looking at a fresh turd on a hot day (police), and there are flies all over it (white supremacists).
The way I see it is that pedos are the perfect thing for the childlike, immature psyche of republicans to focus on and unify around as the evil baddies they have to fight since an actual pedophile is one of the closest things to a disney evil villain who is evil just because.
Republicans really can’t emotionally handle problems in life being more nuanced and complex than a secret cabal of pedophiles that have to be righteously hunted down in witch-hunts. That is satisfying, that gets Republican’s to sit up and pay attention because they get to hate without feeling guilty about it.
Republicans actually can’t handle the world being complex and nuanced, they can’t handle solutions not involving them rolling out a vile hatred for people, so fighting pedophilia is one of the few places left republicans can retreat to, gripping onto their pathetically simplified and hateful world views.
I don’t really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?
Yes
Centrists by and large are ideological cowards Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.
Because it is the mechanism centrists use to arrive at their political beliefs that is cowardly. They don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.
A rightwing fascist emphatically cheers on the genocide of Palestinians (and Jews for that matter confusingly), a leftist emphatically declares genocide is a wrong and a human rights violation. One of those is a dangerous world view that needs to be resisted with force and the other is a world view of harm reduction and solidarity with all humans. What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting “some genocide!” and it is incredibly pathetic.
I have no interest in supporting a “less bad” pro-genocide person. I would sooner die, and there is nothing that anyone can say that would cause me to change that position.
Unlike Biden, when I draw a red line, I actually mean it. If that means we go to hell together, so be it. Genocide is fundamentally unacceptable.
I agree with this 100% and I would go farther. The genocide of Palestinians is a test by the ruling global western order to see how far they can push things before their citizens will revolt.
If we vote for Biden anyway despite this horrific genocide, because Trump!, we are sending a clear message to Biden and the rest of the world that liberal and centrist governments can keep moving forward in a direction of murdering citizens in cities on mass so long as they have a complimentary openly fascist rightwing opposition party to set the Overton window and lend them legitimacy as the only adult choice for voting against the fascists.
Gaza is a prototype make no mistake, we have to reject it existentially NOW. There is nothing to fight for if we don’t because the degree of violence coupled with the degree of willful blindness US media and politicians are engaging in points directly at mass scale violence that is about to come home from the colonies to the colonial powers and world order (there is a good chance if you live in the US that your cities police department trained with the IDF, if that doesn’t terrify you, you are a fool).
Look at the Herero genocide in Africa among other colonial genocides (Belgium should have been leveled to the ground for what it did in the Congo as well) and WW1 suddenly becomes quite clearly an inveitable slingshot of massive amounts of colonial violence turning inwards back towards Europe.
If Biden can successfully win without having to acquiesce to progressives and normal humans with empathy and stop the genocide of Palestinians… the resounding message it sends is that this is a new world paradigm where that is ok and it is open season for everything up to and including genocide being committed in broad daylight in the western world.
We aren’t necessarily on the precipice of WW3, but rather on the precipice of a period of increasing genocidal violence from state and pseudo-state actors (see the rightwing Gaza zionist colonialists for an example) applied to citizens, not only in manufactured events of mass murder but also in complete abandonment of the state’s duty to mitigate environmental crisis (example A being Hurricane Katrina and the US’s lack of giving a shit about the mass suffering in both Louisiana and the Caribbean).
At that point, the magnitudes of violence that are going to continue to unfold in rapid fire will make this question of Trump vs Biden pretty meaningless though Trump is of course an out in the open fascist wannabe dictator and is worse than Biden.
I will happily vote for Biden if he picks up the phone with Netanyahu and tells him it is over full stop. It isn’t even a long phone call if Biden isn’t too much of a coward to lay things out in crystal clear non-negotiable terms.
As it stands, Biden along with the rest centrist democrats are aiding and abetting conservative violent movements in the construction of an alternate reality where the genocide of 50,000 + innocent starving people can be written off with a simple phrase like “but what about the Hamas tunnels!”.
I too would rather die than live in that world and I don’t say that lightly, so yes this is where I put my chips on the table. Others can join us or not join us shrugs but this isn’t a time to live to fight another day, this is a time to escalate what was a minor tactical fight (from Biden’s perspective) into an existential one where Biden has to either give up his close ties with Israel or lose the election.
Billionaires have no legitimate right to exist.
Period.
It doesn’t matter if some of them “do nice things” maybe.
Billionaires should not exist.
Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.
I think what you can say however is that one of the hallmark indicators of centrists (speaking from the context of US politics here just because that is what I know) is that they have no true ideological beliefs. The way a centrist determines right and wrong isn’t by thinking about the problem and applying ethics and critical analysis to it like leftist generally does (and conservatives loudly pretend to do), rather a centrist defines wrong as unpopular.
Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe. This isn’t news to leftists in the US dealing with US centrists, but the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has written it across the sky in big blazing letters that centrism is a catastrophically dangerous way to reach a consensus in a society undergoing crisis and in need of deep reform.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs, we just have to shame them into realizing the hateful positions they have (that they don’t perceive as hateful or not hateful, just average!) make them an outcast and they will fold as they always do to whoever controls the narrative.
At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism, there is nothing ideological to locate among the political center of the US, calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.
Honestly Star Wars has always had trash writing, it was the people around George Lucas that made Star Wars good and the more success and fame Lucas got the less he listened to others and the worse the movies got.
Specifically Lucas subscribed to Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces which is a widely discredited work of anthropology and besides Campbell was an outspoken raging sexist (women can’t be the hero they have to help the hero he said many times).
It is a reductive, authoritarian way of telling stories, it only leaves spaces for the chosen heroes. I also find it makes the universe of Star Wars cynical, evil just happens because we are sinful and it is inevitable. It is boring and not very compelling.
Andor of course goes against the grain on all of these things, brilliant series!
So I think the irony is that if standing with Israel means he can win the election, it’s still a better outcome for Palestine than if he loses. If he loses the election, Trump will tell Israel to just go ahead and glass the area.
The irony is how much you have twisted your political beliefs to find a position you feel ok about this from.
The majority of Americans think what Israel is doing is heinous and want it to stop, the idea that Americans are evenly divided on this is not grounded in reality.
I especially can’t stand that people keep treating it as a fact here that US voters are split 50-50 on Israel’s genocide to stop. The polling is clear, US voters with a decisive majority support Palestine and ending this genocide.
People in this thread asserting that most Americans support Israeli’s actions in this genocide rather than support Palestinians as a some kind of indisputable fact as part of their rhetorical arguments is a self fulfilling prophecy of attempting to manufacture consensus where it doesn’t exist.
Terrorism is not an ideological choice, it is a military strategy employed by groups that do not have the means to fight a more traditional conflict.
Hamas uses “terrorism” but the IDF doesn’t need “terrorism” because it has tanks, advanced fighter jets and one of the most advanced and well armed militaries in the world. It can just slaughter innocent tens of thousands of Palestinians and claim it is doing “military operations” and the world media will shake their heads and agree.
The BLM protests did work, they exposed that the US is a violent police state where voting doesn’t actually do anything to change whether we live in a violent police state because both the Republicans and centrist Democrats will collaborate as much as needed to betray their voters in order to sustain the system of policing and prisons.
The fact that in the wake of George Floyd a lot of cities and municipalities actually went more draconian with their policing laws in backlash is only an indicator of a failure of the BLM protests if you don’t look closer, step closer and you see the truth is far scarier, the BLM protests did massively change the psyche of America, it’s just that actually has no effect upon policy making because democracy is so broken in the US to the extreme point where many city governments chose to actively do their opposite of the will of the people as a show of force and a chilling warning to leftists.
Has the genocide of Palestinians stopped?
I will vote for Biden when he genuinely stops the genocide, until that point I really don’t care what silly political posturing and shuffling around of bombs in warehouses and on logistics sheets Biden does. Even if we stop providing weapons right now of any kind, the entire apparatus of the IDF and indeed Israel itself is dependent on the US military industrial complex, the fact that Biden has not used that leverage to stop this genocide of Palestinians means he is complicit.
Genocide is my red line, and if Biden is going to be windy washy about coming back over that red line don’t blame people like me for not being satisfied.
Has the genocide actually stopped or did Genocide Joe just move the goalposts?
I don’t think you are listening, people were saying this over and over again BEFORE Biden stepped down, we didn’t need hindsight, YOU did because you refused to listen.
I love that y’all admit you were wrong superficially but then insult people who have been making strong arguments for quite a long time that Biden should step down and not run again with statements like “well, who could have known!” with a happy shrug.
We did and people like you almost cost us the election. Do you understand how dangerous a role people like you played in shutting down criticism of Biden and attacking concerned Democrats like they were all Russia trollbots or something?
You speak of the danger of divisiveness, of having democrats split up and fractured… hopefully you do realize that is PRECISELY what democrats shouting down concerns about Biden were doing? Can you at least see that in 20/20 hindsight?
What have you learned that will lead you into NOT making the same potentially catastrophic miscalculation next time around?
…because you realize y’all look like clowns in the wake of Harris raising 200 million and 170,000 volunteers in a week right?
Honestly, you need to stop commenting on politics until you dismantle your world view and understanding of how US politics works please, you don’t understand very basic shit here. I don’t know what more proof you need than the last month or so of politics.
Don’t give me this “Wow, happy surprise! Who woulda thought things could go so well!” nonsense, it is insulting and minimizing to those of us who have actually been paying attention and understood the political forces at play.